Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

Literature Now

by Rebecca L. Walkowitz

As a growing number of contemporary novelists write for publication in multiple languages, the genre's form and aims are shifting. Born-translated novels include passages that appear to be written in different tongues, narrators who speak to foreign audiences, and other visual and formal techniques that treat translation as a medium rather than as an afterthought. These strategies challenge the global dominance of English, complicate "native" readership, and protect creative works against misinterpretation as they circulate. They have also given rise to a new form of writing that confounds traditional models of literary history and political community.

Born Translated builds a much-needed framework for understanding translation's effect on fictional works, as well as digital art, avant-garde magazines, literary anthologies, and visual media. Artists and novelists discussed include J. M. Coetzee, Junot Díaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, Ben Lerner, China Miéville, David Mitchell, Walter Mosley, Caryl Phillips, Adam Thirlwell, Amy Waldman, and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. The book understands that contemporary literature begins at once in many places, engaging in a new type of social embeddedness and political solidarity. It recasts literary history as a series of convergences and departures and, by elevating the status of "born-translated" works, redefines common conceptions of author, reader, and nation.

Genres: Academic, Nonfiction, Literature

336 pages, Hardcover

First published July 21, 2015

About the author

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is professor of English and affiliate faculty in the comparative literature program at Rutgers University. Her books are Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006).

Reviews

[Jared Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

By challenging dominant models of literary sequencing, in which circulation always trails production, literary histories that incorporate translation recalculate the meanings of author and translator, original and derivation, native and foreign, just to name a few of the foundational distinctions that have shaped world literature as we’ve known it.

[World Literature Today]

"Constantly aware of her semantically loaded and ambitious title, Rebecca L. Walkowitz rightly focuses her epilogue on the mutability of “translated,” having taken her readers on a decisive journey through a state-of-the-art critical and theoretical minefield. Her five chapters, each truly novel in terms of revising extant scholarship, weave a double helix: (1) world literature and its theory, presently understood, as a limit to heterogeneity; and (2) the avatars of belonging, circulation, and location of culture, readership, and reading." - Will H. Corral

This book was reviewed in the May/August 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...